The Need

NEP 2020 caters to a multitude of requirements along with many schemes and programs run by the Ministry of Education that benefit different facets of education & stakeholders. But these schemes face challenges in effective implementation due to lack of:

  1. Timely Visibility to Progress and relevant metrics - 'Ability to See' by different stakeholders on what's going on
  2. Insights about what's happening - 'Ability to Make Sense' of what's working/what's not
  3. Coordination in driving improvements - 'Ability to Amplify Actions' through timely, coordinated efforts based on data & insights

Keeping in view the challenges faced, a comprehensive system is required through which the relevant stakeholders will be able to track progress of various education initiatives . The critical currency to successfully implement various schemes at scale is Data. The ability to effectively collect, monitor, correlate, and analyze data will lead to timely actions to implement schemes.

Today, various educational programs by government bodies may run in independent silos. Integrating various data sets and breaking the barrier of operating in silos will help the education department effectively leverage different initiatives towards a common goal.

The Solution Approach

The NDEAR compliant VSK is an institutional setup that will enable integrated and shared 'seeing' for amplifying data-based decision making and actioning by key stakeholders for academic and non-academic activities and thereby improving learning outcomes.

VSK will be a "Force Multiplier" that will amplify the existing capabilities of people or systems, enabling transformative impact towards outcomes.

The main benefits envisioned for the NDEAR compliant VSK are:

  1. To be able to "see" actionable insights from the aggregated data of various schemes/programs under the ambit of Samagra Siksha.
  2. To see data and insights from field level academic and non academic activities at central and state level and also empower the administrator and teachers in the field to take data driven actions.
  3. With the help of student registry, keep track of enrolled students, learning at home, drop-outs information on child labour mainstreamed, Out of school children, textbook and uniform delivery, scholarships, allowances, school-based assessment, support required by teachers and schools, awards, recognition, etc.
  4. To improve academic performance of students and to empower the teachers in schools and effective utilization of available resources.
  5. To identify and analyze improvement areas for decision making and program gaps that need immediate attention.
  6. To develop centralized and localized dashboards providing continuous and updated data insights on performance indicators of schools.
  7. Empower field level staff so see insights from data for their relevant programs/schemes and coach them to take actions to improve educational outcomes
  8. Capture data efficiently using data phygitisation (digitize data from physical documents like attendance register, marks sheet etc) which significantly reduces the time from data collection to data entry.

The Ecosystem

Ecosystem partners like Central / State Government organizations, private players, civil societies (NGOs, NPOs, etc.) can :

  1. Drive improvement and action through the data available through Vidya Samiksha Kendra (VSK).
  2. Leverage the open-source building blocks used to develop VSK, to roll-out VSK-inspired programs in your context for empowering stakeholders with the ability to "See, Act and Solve"
  3. Enhance and contribute to the open-source building blocks used for VSK development.

To get involved, write to ndearpmu[at]ciet[dot]nic[dot]in

Adoption Across States

  • A dedicated team and a standard package is being set up by CIET-NCERT in collaboration with NIC to help states/UTs initiate NDEAR VSK. This package will help state the software aspect of the VSK and will enable versions that will have few standard data integration and visualization out of the box for 4-6 programs like DIKSHA, USIDE, NAS, PM Poshan, PGI. etc. The state may choose to adopt the same and can later build on top of it too.
  • A workshop will be conducted with the states/UTs on the same so that their efforts are in alignment with the NDEAR principles.